How exactly will Reeves’s funding boost fix the NHS?

The NHS was a big winner at the Spending Review, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves announcing a ‘record cash injection’. Two hundred miles from the Commons in Manchester, NHS England Chief Executive Sir Jim Mackey, told healthcare leaders gathered at the NHS confederation’s annual ‘expo’ that the government had ‘done us a good turn’.

There will be a £29 billion real-terms increase in day-to-day spending for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), with its annual budget reaching £232 billion by 2028-29. The budget for the NHS in England alone will rise to £226 billion. Government spending on health and care will have doubled in a decade. The DHSC budget will eclipse the national income of Portugal and more than 40p in every government pound will be spent on the NHS.

There was a strong sense of déjà vu listening to the Chancellor, as she reflected a growing fiscal orthodoxy. Greater NHS spending has been awarded owing to popular acceptance, whilst other areas of public spending are squeezed – including those which directly impact the ‘wider determinants of health’.

There will be an increase of £4 billion for adult social care (by 2028/9, compared to 2025/6), but care clearly remains the poor relation. Little was mentioned of the life sciences or MedTech – genuine engines of economic growth – with reform announcements saved for a life sciences sector plan, due later this month.

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The government states that the purpose of the uplift is to enable the NHS to ‘cut waiting lists, improve patient care and modernise services’. Much of the policy ambition – from seeking to improve the NHS App to hiring more GPs – is welcome and these measures have previously been recommended by Policy Exchange. But it is in no way certain these objectives will be realised.

Internal modelling from the DHSC, reported over the weekend, suggests the government’s ‘milestone’ for waiting times – that 92 per cent of patients will start consultant-led treatment for elective care within 18 weeks of referral – is ‘over-optimistic’. Policy Exchange estimate it would take another 155 months (or, to April 2038) to reach or exceed this target if the government were to continue on the performance trajectory we have seen since last year’s general election. 

Despite significant ‘inputs’ to the NHS budget and in staffing numbers, a significant gap in productivity compared to pre-pandemic years remains (-9 per cent comparing 2019/20 to 2022/23).  

It is welcome that central departmental costs will be reduced, but the service has struggled to deliver the 2 per cent productivity improvement demanded in recent years. There is a risk that this investment simply disappears into thin air once more. The £22.6 billion uplift announced in last year’s Autumn Statement has already been consumed by inflation and pensions.

The DHSC will begin the Spending Review period £1 billion ‘in the red’ and it has been suggested that the latest investment could be ‘absorbed’ by rising medicine prices and pay rises alone. A ’50 per cent increase’ in investment for ‘NHS technology and digital transformation’ is proposed, but a clear strategy and the mechanisms required to make good on this investment are still lacking. The recent recruitment of Axel Heitmüller as the PM’s ‘expert adviser’ on health is a sign that there will be a welcome focus on how to spread innovation more effectively, given his prior experience.

Whilst the capital budget will increase, it will remain flat in real terms, squeezing the resources required to ‘modernise services’ or to address a maintenance backlog now over £14 billion. The NHS will look to make greater use of private finance, but the announcement they will do so – rather curiously – was not made by the Chancellor. Instead it appeared on the NHS England website later in the day, as part of Mackey’s own ‘100 day plan’, which moots the introduction of an ‘off–balance sheet capital investment mechanism’. The form this will take has not yet been clarified.

In boosting NHS spending once more, the government has raised the political stakes for reform. It is clear that they regard turning around a ‘broken’ service as being at the vanguard of meeting a more existential challenge: ‘We must have a strong NHS – not…an insurance-based system,’ the Chancellor reflected yesterday, looking up at the MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage.

But with the public again expected to back another massive rise in the NHS budget, with limited reckoning of the trade-offs in the near-term, their patience may be tested if improvement is not felt soon. The government’s ten-year health plan must convince the public that they have the strategy in place, or it will look like the Chancellor is making a large, rather speculative investment.

Life is too precious for assisted dying

Assisted dying has attracted for me, and no doubt many other MPs, far more mail than any other issue. The weight of this mail on either side of the argument has been pretty much the same. It has also involved more surgery discussions than any other subject, and an online meeting for my constituents, which around a hundred people participated in.

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The interest and passion on both sides of the argument has been immense, but so has been the respect that all have given to this sensitive topic.

Technically the bill’s proposers and the committee have done an impressive piece of work. They included a suggestion I made that social workers also be a part of the teams that examines these cases, and for this I am grateful.

But is this enough? 

As MPs, we have been given this subject to deal with on the basis of our consciences, and with much personal discussion with family, friends and professionals. I have looked into the subtleties of the arguments, and found myself drawn to personal experience to also help me find clarity.

At the end of the day just knowing that there is a bill in place, may, as has been suggested by others, be a relief. But for others, it will produce an anxiety, and a questioning over what to do as the end-of-life approaches. 

Thoughts, for example, of ‘becoming a burden’ on one’s family may arise, when they donot need to.

The current state of end-of-life care cannot be described as optimal. The provision of hospices across our country is patchy at best. 

Just recently I took part in a sponsored walk along with friends and colleagues, on the ‘Men’s Walk to Support’ for Dorothy House Hospice, that lies on the western edge of my constituency. Four hundred of us took part and collectively we raised around £71,000, but this amount does not even touch the sides of the need, especially after the increase in national insurance for employers is taken into account. The £100 million announced by the government for capital projects at hospices, while welcome, does not help with the everyday costs.

It has been pointed out to me that if hospices are properly supported, then much of the problem that this bill seeks to deal with goes away, and where it does not, doctors must be supported and protected when they are dealing with extreme pain, especially when its amelioration hastens the death of the patient. 

But this care at the bedside should not be interfered with by judicial process. It is too intimate, too pressing, too delicate.

So, what should be done with those who want to die, perhaps before their natural end comes, but out of fear for what is to come? 

I will tell the story of my own sister, who just a few days before the end of her life regained her lucidity, after years of dealing with cancer. Following days of being for the most part unconscious, she called her two young sons to her bedside and told them not to be afraid, but to be strong, and to do the right things in their lives, and that she would always be looking over them. 

Such moments are priceless and would potentially be denied if this bill was passed. People are surprising. Life, and indeed death, is hard. But it does not mean we should, even if we could, escape from these situations, which are all different and subject to the individuals and families involved. 

Making the decision to approve this bill would introduce a huge grey area to the end of life, which we will all one day have to face. Life is too precious. For the sake of the many and having voted for the bill to go through to its committee stage, I now, at the third reading, and after much thought, will be voting against it.   

What is the point of the RSPCA?

The secretly-filmed footage is a horror show. Hens are desperately trying to escape as they suffocate in a gas chamber. The birds, which are being killed for supermarket meat because they’re past their egg-laying days, gasp for breath. They appear to cry out as they die slowly. The floor of the gas chamber is littered with dead bodies.

Should we phone the RSPCA? Oh, someone already did. The animal welfare charity’s response? While it acknowledged that the footage was deeply upsetting, it said that using carbon dioxide to gas chickens was permitted under RSPCA welfare standards:

‘This can be incredibly difficult to watch but the birds are actually unconscious when this happens, and are not experiencing pain.’

Really? The RSPCA’s ‘Assured Scheme’, which certifies farms, food producers and food retailers that meet its specific animal welfare standards, does indeed allow hens to be killed in either gas chambers or electric water baths. Its website tells us:

‘The RSPCA welfare standards require birds to be killed within 10 seconds of exit from the water bath. The RSPCA is committed to phasing out inverted shackling systems, and these are currently only allowed under strict conditions of use.’

Is this meant to be reassuring for animal lovers? The anti-cruelty charity also approves slaughter by gas or maceration of day-old chicks, describing this as an ‘effective and humane kill’.

Pigs can be painfully mutilated on RSCPA-approved farms, with tail docking and teeth clipping both allowed in certain cases. The charity also allows pigs to be slaughtered in gas chambers. In RSPCA Assured slaughterhouses, ‘the concentration (of Carbon Dioxide) must be at least 90 per cent,’the charity informs us. Crumbs of comfort for those poor animals in their final moments.

An investigation published in the Independent claimed that pigs who meet their end in this way have been known to ‘scream in pain and gasp for breath’ and ‘scramble to try to escape, panicking and in distress’.

Turkeys don’t fare much better: they can have their beaks painfully trimmed on RSCPA-backed farms. But the better news for the birds is that, when they go to the slaughterhouse, the charity says they shouldn’t be picked up by only one leg. They might be too tired and distressed to care by that point, because the guidelines allow cramped journeys of up to several hours between farm and slaughterhouse before they die.

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It doesn’t look like these pathetic guidelines are always observed anyway. Campaign group Animal Rising claimed to have found ‘systemic animal cruelty’ at a number of RSCPA-approved abattoirs. Its investigators discovered last year that in one slaughterhouse 85 per cent of pigs were stunned incorrectly, leaving animals conscious during slaughter; in another, 96 per cent of cows were prodded with an electric goad, a practice banned by the RSPCA. Some 46 per cent of cows showed clear signs of panic or escape behaviours, it added.

There was also ‘frequent verbal and physical abuse from workers’, said the campaigners. Animals ‘watch(ed) in terror and panic as other animals were killed or stunned in front of them’. The society suspended the abattoirs and launched an investigation, insisting that it takes allegations of poor animal welfare ‘incredibly seriously’.

But the wildlife TV presenter Chris Packham and former Green Party MP Caroline Lucas had enough; they quit as president and vice-president of the RSPCA after the findings. Queen guitarist Sir Brian May has also stepped down, after what he called ‘damning evidence’ of animal welfare failings related to its food certification label. The RSPCA said it had ‘different views from Brian on how best to approach this complex challenge’.

When animal rights campaigners released an advert to expose the awful truth about dairy farming, the RSPCA’s head of public affairs, David Bowles, accused activists of using ’emotive’ language. Bowles once took to Twitter to say that ‘seal shooting is not culling it’s about humane pest control’. This animal lover disagrees.

What is the purpose of an animal welfare charity that behaves like this? What is the RSPCA doing with the tens of millions of pounds that the public donates to it each year?

The charity does do good work for animals. In 2022 alone, it put 29,945 pets in loving new homes, for instance. They also say their helpline receives 90,000 calls each month. When they can, they do go out and help animals in need. This is what people love about them. But other animal charities do equally admirable work on that front and the RSPCA increasingly feels like a relic that has lost its way.

With the RSPCA, its mission is spelled out in its name: the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It’s meant to prevent cruelty to animals. But, when animals need it most, the RSPCA is too often looking the other way; or, in the case of those poor hens, actively sweeping animal suffering under the carpet.

The sad decline of reading

At secondary school open days, English teachers are always asked the same questions by anxious parents of year six students: How do I get my child to read more? Why has my child suddenly stopped reading? What books would you recommend to make reading less of a chore?

This apprehension is not surprising. Reading enjoyment among children and young people has fallen to its lowest level in two decades, according to research by the National Literacy Trust. The decline is particularly pronounced in teenage boys, of whom only a quarter said they enjoyed reading in their spare time. Adults are equally afflicted: 40 per cent of Britons have not read or listened to a book in the past year, and men account for only 20 per cent of fiction sales in the US, Canada and Britain.

Reading is a habit, and habits need to be practised. Yet parents are no longer even reading to their children: according to a recent survey by Harper Collins, fewer than half of Gen-Z parents think reading out loud to their children is ‘fun’, and a third believe reading is more of a ‘subject to be learnt’ than something to be enjoyed.

Screentime is the obvious culprit. Mornings previously spent reading in bed are now spent scrolling through social media. Commutes are about composing emails rather than devouring spy thrillers. Quiet evenings are for binge-watching limitless series while books lay untouched.

Even as an English teacher, I am in a nightly battle against my post-work tiredness, my internet-enfeebled attention span, and, of course, my phone. I regularly resort to strategies to restart the routine: listening to audiobooks, joining a bookclub to hold myself accountable, borrowing from a library to give myself a deadline, bingeing during the school holidays, taking myself on a shopping trip to Blackwell’s so that it feels like a ‘treat’. In our world of shiny new toys, it’s so easy to forget what a gift reading is.

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What is even more depressing is we are not just losing the will to read, but the ability. Our overstimulated, dopamine-addled brains can no longer handle the sustained concentration of reading, which may explain why thirty per cent of Americans read at the level you would expect of a 10-year-old child. A recent piece in the Atlantic found that many university professors no longer assign long or complex texts because their students cannot cope with them; another study on the links between smartphones and cognitive decline suggests that we may have passed peak brain power.

This is only going to get worse. In the early days of the World Wide Web, the internet was more like print media: reading articles, forums, blogs. It was primarily text-based. Now the internet is more like television: its YouTube-fuelled evolution towards short-form video means it has become a visual medium: snippets, snapshots, screenshots, pop-ups. Online, we are no longer readers but viewers.

As scholar Mark Cuenco writes, the reading involved when staring at a screen is ‘fundamentally dynamic, ever-fleeting, disjointed… the character of the content delivers indigestible volumes of information all at once, without much sequence or structure.’ He argues that ‘the experience of reading a tweet or the caption on a TikTok is so radically different from that of reading a book (one locks us into an endless scroll, while the other has a definitive start and end point) that they are hardly comparable.’ Online, the medium becomes the message.

Who knows what the future of our post-literate society will look like: perhaps reading paperbacks will soon be seen as an esoteric hobby, the diversion of a special ‘reading class’, much like it was before the second half of the nineteenth century. What we do know is that reading fiction fosters imagination, empathy, concentration, critical thinking, language development, better memory, knowledge and understanding. It is both relaxing and stimulating, escapist and grounding.

It is not, however, something to force your way through. If students are going to resist the overwhelming pull to look at the blackhole of their iPhone screen, then we need to offer them an alternative that is genuinely enjoyable. There are some amazing young adult novels out there – The Girl With All The Gifts, After The First Death, Scythe – yet far too much is either really poorly written, or more preoccupied with social justice over a really good story.

As Maryanne Wolf writes, when reading goes well, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. Yet for too many children (and adults), reading has become like swimming upstream, trying to stay afloat amidst the riptides of instant information and gratification. The harder reading becomes, the less likely we are to exercise that part of our brain, or encourage the younger generation to do so – and we will all be poorer and weaker for it.

Save the miniskirt!

What is it about men and miniskirts? A few months ago, I read with horror – but sadly not surprise – about a school that was considering banning girls from wearing skirts. Apparently, residents in Whitstable, Kent, were so alarmed at the ‘inappropriate skirt lengths’ spotted around town they had complained to the local school. Headteacher Alex Holmes (you guessed it – a man) immediately dashed off a letter informing parents that all pupils could be forced to wear trousers as part of a new ‘gender neutral uniform’ in response.

I’m sorry, what? Are we talking about a pretty seaside town in Kent or downtown Tehran? I thought the days of men lining girls up in a row to measure their hemlines were over. Clearly not. That letter sent a grim message to teenage girls. It told them that wearing short skirts is morally corrupt, sexually deviant and dangerous. How depressing.

It got me thinking about my hemlines over the years. Back at school, me and my mates would try to outbid each other when it came to who had the miniest miniskirt. I went to a comprehensive in London in the nineties, so didn’t have to wear uniform. Instead, every weekend we would scour the clothes rails at Topshop picking out the latest thigh-slimming numbers. We all wanted to look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Friends series 1/2 (think black mini, white top and knee-high boots). If I’m honest, I still want to look like this.

Looking back at photos of those years, I made some terrible fashion mistakes. I’m not sure the Adidas 3-stripe shell suit partnered with a beret was ever a good idea. But those skirts are not one of them. The miniskirt is a symbol of women’s liberation – not sexual servitude. Invented by British designer Mary Quant in the 1960s so women could ‘run and dance’, they were short on the hemline and big on fun. And they soon went global.

In Iran, women slipped into their miniskirts, cut their hair off into bobs, and went to university to study to be scientists, academics and engineers. But if a woman in Iran wore a miniskirt in public today she would be arrested and brutally punished. Those who bravely defy the morality police and refuse to wear a hijab and show their hair in public are lashed. Or, worse still, have their eyes gouged out. It is a double punishment. A cruel act of violence that leaves women unable to see – and robs them of their looks.

It is also a salutary lesson for us all. Women fought hard for the right to wear what they want. And these rights can be lost too. Our schools should be teaching teenage girls to be proud of their looks and confident to wear what they want. No man should be getting his tape measure out to check a girl’s hemline. Even if he is a headteacher.

The deadly curse of influencers

What’s the most hazardous occupation? Deep sea fisherman? Uranium miner? Tail-end Charlie in a Lancaster bomber (not a career currently available)? I challenge anyone to find a speedier way to meet one’s end than becoming an influencer. The sad death of 28-year-old University of Salford student Maria Eftimova, who tumbled off Tryfan, a 1,000ft mountain in Snowdonia during a hike organised on Facebook, is one of those all-too-regular headlines: an influencer who meets their end in their twenties, leaving tens of thousands of followers distraught.

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Policymakers fret over children falling under bad influences online – we have had an entire Online Safety Act to try to address the problem. But the hazards facing the influenced seem nothing like those suffered by the people who are doing the influencing. There was, for example, 24-year-old Chinese extreme-eater Pan Xiaoting, who liked to live-stream her eating binges – and died during one in July last year after her stomach burst while trying to consume 10kg of chocolate and other foods. Or there was 21-year-old Thanakarn Kanthee, a Thai national who died at New Year after trying to down two bottles of whisky in 20 minutes.

They, you might say, had it coming. But the influencer curse doesn’t just seem to extend to people doing stupidly dangerous things – falling off buildings and bridges while trying to climb them illicitly is another favourite. All Guava Shuishi liked to do was put on make-up (although she did have an unfortunate habit of tasting it at the same time). She died of a ‘mystery illness’ earlier this month. She, funnily enough, was also 24. While rock stars became notorious for coming to grief aged 27 (as per Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison), influencers seem to have developed an unnerving habit of writing themselves out of the script three years earlier. Hari Harris, who just liked to give interior decorating tips to his online followers, did at least make it to 29 before falling down the stairs at his family’s home in Shrewsbury in February.

Although it often goes unstated, reading between the lines suggests that suicide is a big killer of influencers. Social media seems to have created a world which offers instant fame for a few but also the certainty of a big crash in self-esteem when the followers and likes inevitably start to dry up. It is not, though, immediately obvious why the fame and rejection offered by social media should be so much more lethal than the same cycle of ups and downs which has afflicted generations of pop stars, writers, actors and artists. Many developed destructive habits but few set out deliberately to take their lives.

Maybe the essential difference is that most performers in the pre-social media age were at least forced to keep one foot on the ground by having to go out and perform in pubs and clubs – if not on a big stage. They were forced into contact with fellow strugglers. The life of an influencer need not involve other people at all – it can be carried out entirely in isolation. ‘Social’ media is one of the great misnomers of our age: for many people it is the route to a solitary life. Covid lockdowns served only to encourage the idea that you can achieve global fame without ever having to leave your bedroom.

Still fancy being an influencer? There are few original ideas, but if I were minded to set up a TikTok or Instagram account I can think of one theme which, as far as I am aware, no-one has tried: how to live to the age of 30.

Economist accuses Reeves of ‘making up numbers’ in spending review

While certain government departments celebrated Rachel Reeves’s spending review – Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner even threw a party the night before the Chancellor’s speech – economists are not quite as impressed. In fact, the Labour Chancellor has been accused of ‘making up numbers’ in her big speech after offering up rather incoherent guidance on how departments would make savings. Oh dear…

The director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies Paul Johnson insisted his organisation is unable to ‘find any particular area of spending the government has decided it wants to withdraw from’ except overseas aid – despite Reeves constituently claiming that the Treasury had looked ‘line by line’ at every department’s spending plans in the zero-based review. Johnson noted that almost every government unit faced ‘exactly the same cut in its administration budgets…irrespective of [any] planned spending increase’. Remarking immediately after the Chancellor’s speech that it was ‘full of numbers, few of them useful’, the IFS director added rather scathingly today:

That is not the result of a serious department by department analysis. I hesitate to accuse the Treasury of making up numbers but…

Shots fired!

In its analysis released in the immediate aftermath of the review, the IFS admitted that health and defence were the ‘big winners’ but pointed to systematic issues in the NHS and the changing international situation to caveat: ‘One has to wonder whether this will be enough.’ Meanwhile, Andrew Goodwin, chief UK economists at Oxford Economics, concluded: ‘It looks increasingly likely that substantial tax increases will be needed.’ Oo er.

It’s another bad sign for Reeves after this morning’s ‘disappointing’ news from the Office for National Statistics that revealed the UK’s GDP had fallen by 0.3 per cent in April. The Leeds West and Pudsey MP has already had to fend off suggestions that she is a ‘buy now, pay later…Klarna chancellor’ – instead insisting that amid the GDP downtick, her spending review will deliver growth. It would appear she has her work cut out winning out the economists, however…

Hogg out: youngest DNC vice chair ousted

Congratulations David Hogg: the youngest ever DNC vice chair has earned the honor of serving the shortest term in the committee’s history.

Though his tenure was brief, Hogg managed to rattle many cages. After his election, the 25-year-old announced a $20 million plan to primary older Democratic incumbents in safe seats running for reelection. This plan quickly generated backlash within the party: veteran Democratic strategist James Carville called it “the most insane thing” he’s ever heard. Hogg stood his ground and suddenly the DNC deployed its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion requirements. That included one more woman and one fewer Hogg. Cue various facile jokes about his name:

Central to the ousting is Native American Kalyn Free, 61, who lost her bid and proceeded to file a complaint arguing the election was “fatally flawed” and “violated the DNC Charter and discriminated against three women-of-color candidates,” as Semafor reported.

The committee announced Wednesday afternoon they had voted 294-99 in favor of holding a new election for two of the vice chair seats, which had been occupied by Hogg and his counterpart, Malcolm Kenyatta (another man). This new election set for June 17 guarantees the DNC two massive wins: an even tighter equality – sorry, equity – between the sexes, and the removal of an interloper pushing for real change in how the committee operates.

With Hogg not running in the second election, Kenyatta will by default take the remaining male-designated seat. But Hogg is not going gentle into that good night. In a lengthy Wednesday night X thread, Hogg said he stands by the views which led to his DNC removal.

He cited the party’s 27 percent approval rating and said, “If we don’t show our country how we are dramatically changing and provide an alternative vision for the future as a party, we will continue to lose.” Hogg will work with his organization, Leaders We Deserve, to rid the party of “Democrats dying in office that have helped to hand Republicans an expanded majority.”

While it looks like the Hogg controversy is wrapping up neatly, Cockburn sees the claw marks his ouster has on the party – particularly the party leader. Ken Martin, the DNC’s acting chair, told other party leaders that infighting with Hogg left him unsure about his ability to lead the party, according to a report in Politico Sunday.

“I’ll be very honest with you, for the first time in my 100 days on this job… the other night I said to myself for the first time, I don’t know if I wanna do this anymore,” Martin told DNC officers in a May 15 Zoom meeting.

The vice chair continued, “No one knows who the hell I am, right? I’m trying to get my sea legs underneath of me and actually develop any amount of credibility so I can go out there and raise the money and do the job I need to to put ourselves in a position to win.” Martin then turned his attention to Hogg. “And again, I don’t think you intended this, but you essentially destroyed any chance I have to show the leadership that I need to. So it’s really frustrating,” he said.

Will Martin be able to straighten out his sea legs? Or will the Democrats remain in Hogg Hell?

Westminster must fall

Dominic Cummings delivered a Pharos Lecture in Oxford this week on why western regimes are in crisis. Here is an edited transcript of his speech:

The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.

If you imagine our ancestors who built our civilisation over generations, looking at a sample of recent years, what would they see? They’d see the regime fighting to maintain secrecy of the vast cover-up of industrialised mass rape of white English children by Pakistani and Somali gangs over decades, while Whitehall continues to import people from the exact same tribal areas responsible.

In January, No. 10 Downing Street claimed that Elon Musk was spreading conspiracy theories about national cover-ups. This is wrong. I witnessed the attempts at these cover-ups myself when I was in working in Whitehall – including the deliberate attempt by government departments to use courts to block reporting of the entire story.

Every week in London and across Britain, people openly marched demanding a second Holocaust. And the only people who seem to get arrested are those counterprotesting. These protestors prevent access to parliament itself and intimidate MPs; and the MPs’ response is to jabber about how the real danger is white extremism, and the real priority is protecting the European Convention of Human Rights.

The regime is introducing new blasphemy laws, but obviously only for the world’s most famous religion of peace. Week after week, the courts use the European Convention of Human Rights to stop deportation of the worst criminals.

The ECHR system that Britain set up to stop Europe sliding back to totalitarianism, is now being used – thanks to cross-party, multi-decade consensus – by sex criminals and terrorists to force us to prioritise them in ever more grotesque ways.

You have seen recently the news that the guy who stabbed the girls in Southport attacked prison guards, but you won’t have seen why these cases keep occurring. The reason is the Cabinet Office legal advice states that it’s unlawful under the European Convention of Human Rights to keep even convicted terrorists under surveillance, even in high-security jails, because it breaches their rights to privacy.

So, when cases like this happen, officials prioritise covering up the ECHR’s role. They do not prioritise the rights of prison guards not to have burning oil thrown in their faces.

The regime destroyed border control, even though the main reason for ‘Leave’ winning the EU referendum was the desire for more border control. Then it imported unprecedented millions; and hundreds of thousands more simply got on the stupid boats in France and came over. They did so safe in the knowledge that MPs have created a legal regime that makes it practically impossible to deport anybody. The only people left in the world who now seem to listen to what the Home Office says are the tiny fraction of the most skilled people in the world who we actually want to come here. These are the people who the Home Office wages a constant jihad against to stop them coming into the country.

The regime has broken housing markets, so unless your parents are rich, it’s going to be much harder for you to get a home, and build a family, than it was for your parents. It’s executed a set of economic policies that have created the worst period since Napoleon for productivity and real wage growth.

It’s broken the NHS so badly that Ukrainian refugees returned to a literal war zone to get healthcare. And these pathological institutions attack the things that work. So if this building was suddenly taken over by terrorists, we would depend on special forces to come and solve the situation. Those special forces now have to have meetings about the Cabinet Office’s constant lawfare against them. They’re having to hire lawyers to defend themselves over operations which they were given medals for over the last few decades.

I’ve sat in the Cabinet Office watching as terrorists actually on the run from cave to cave in Pakistan call on satellite phones London lawyers, using human rights laws to demand that British taxpayers give them millions. And the Cabinet Office says we’ve got to pay them out. And it sends over these millions, and then it classifies it all in such a high level that no MPs know about it. These cases are not discussed in parliament. These cases are not discussed in the media.

In 2020, we started monitoring sewage and provided real time data on disease spread. It is a crucial piece of infrastructure for public health; the same way the Victorians built institutions which we rely on. So, of course, the regime closed it down.

We proved you could do vaccine research ten times more effectively. So they closed the vaccine task force. We created what I think is the West’s first data science and AI team inside a Prime Minister’s Office. The Cabinet Office and Treasury have tried to vandalise it for five years and close it down.

If you think, well, at least things like nuclear weapons must be taken seriously, no, that’s also wrong. For 20 years, there’s been a disastrous procurement process costing tens of billions, which, again, is kept super secret so that it’s not the subject of discussion in parliament, nor the subject of discussion in the media.

So neither the worst pandemic since 1918, nor the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler, have made Westminster change – quite the opposite. Since the war started in Ukraine, Ministry Of Defence procurement has got worse and worse. When I said in 2020, the future of war was drones and robots, Westminster laughed. Now we see all this playing out on YouTube. But the MOD has spent the years of the Ukraine war deliberately resisting facing this reality. And when people return from Ukraine to explain what’s happening inside the MOD, they’re told: ‘Do not tell senior officials, do not tell ministers’. Our priority is continuing the budgets for the stupid old tanks and all the things inside MOD procurement that don’t work. We want to keep the old gravy train running.

So step by step, the old regime has piled up the tinder. As Mao said, ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’. Britain, practically alone in the world, has avoided serious political violence for centuries. But the crumbling of our regime and its elites mean we’re now only random viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting out of control.

The kind of official story about how government works is that the MPs get up every day and they think about voters and they think about elections. This is not true. A lot of the reason why the news often makes no sense is that people think that the official story is true, but it is not. What MPs actually focus on all day is the old media and their promotions. Their reality comes from this old media. But, of course, this old media itself is breaking down under the power and the shock of the internet.

We therefore see this kind of what I’ve called a sort of narrative whiplash that now dominates Westminster debates. Everyone herds to one story. The story turns out to be complete nonsense. And then everyone drops it and they herd to a new story. But everything is memory holed.

I’ll just give a few examples on social media. In 2008, the official story blasted everywhere from the New York Times to the British media was that social media is all nonsense and it has no effect. In 2012, the official story became, actually, it’s wonderful because it’s helped President Obama win. In 2016, it became, actually far from being nonsense, social media technology is evil Jedi-mind controlling technology, and that’s the real reason why Brexit happened and why Trump happened.

If you look at the start of the Covid pandemic, public health experts laughed at the supermodel Caprice when she went on TV and said: ‘Why are we not closing the borders?’ Remember that? She just voiced what normal people were saying. And, of course, all the public health experts mocked her all over Twitter and they said: ‘No, no, no, no, no. Closing the borders is racist. The actual plan is we’ve got no choice but to run up the white flag. Vaccines are impossible. Tests won’t work. Everyone will just have to do herd immunity without a vaccine and put up with no health service for months’.

Then the whole story suddenly flipped. And, according to the Guardian and the BBC, the only people resisting this new story were the crazy right-wing Brexit people.

The same kind of narrative whiplash is played out in the stupidest war in modern history in Ukraine, the war which never needed to happen. At the beginning, the official story was that the Ukraine war is nothing to do with Ukraine joining Nato. Then the official story became Ukraine must join Nato. They started off saying the war must continue, that it is bleeding Russia dry. And then the story became that the war must continue because Russia is strengthening and they’re building this terrible drone force. They’re getting more and more efficient. So the war must continue.

Over and over again then, we see this constant splitting of the official story; these deranged narratives are the reality for Whitehall and for our MPs. That’s what they’re watching all day. That’s what actually determines their behaviour.

A very telling example, I think, was that, if I’d said ten years ago that just before the 2024 US election Democrat presidential candidates will openly state that the First Amendment of America was a historic mistake that will be fixed after the election, everyone would have thought that was completely barking mad and completely inconceivable that that would be the case before.

In the days before the 2024 election, that’s exactly what John Kerry said, and what Hillary Clinton said. The legendary music producer Rick Rubin said, ‘Wrestling is real, the news is fake’. And I think this is a very important principle to absorb. Wrestling is real. The news is fake. And if there’s one word now to describe the Westminster regime: fake is the word. Fake meetings, fake decisions, fake news. Fake all the way through.

The only people that are struggling to see this, though, are the people inside the system. Why is this? Marshall McLuhan said that a new medium becomes invisible during the period of its innovation to almost everyone. And I think that this is part of what’s happening. This weird narrative whiplash, and this fake news is not visible to the MPs and the officials who are running around chasing 24-hour news all day.

It’s visible to to people outside; if you talk to normal voters, they see these problems. But inside Westminster, the fake story is the real story. And the reason why I think this is happening, I’ll put it in a broader, broader context is, I think we’re going through a normal cycle of history: slow rot, elites blind and then fragmenting, sudden crisis, fast collapse and then regime change and a new elite with new ideas. I think the core reason for this is that, over a period of a few generations, over and over again, we see a similar story play out; the ideas and institutions of the ruling elites become pulled away from reality. They struggle to adapt to reality. And then, eventually, this gap between the stories that they tell themselves, and what’s actually happening in the real world, this gap falls apart and they fall down into the crack of it.

I’ll give a parallel to what I think is happening now, which is in the mid-19th century. If you go back to the 1840s, you see a generation who’ve gone through the Napoleonic Wars writing letters to each other. They can feel the collapse of the old order. And they write about this. They talk about the crazy ideas that are spreading in the universities and amongst the young. They discuss the crumbling of the old conservatism of throne and altar, the spread of atheism, the spread of liberalism and socialism. They discuss new technologies like rail and the telegram. And they discuss how they can feel the 1815 international security system is also starting to crumble.

Then, in 1848, dominoes fall, regimes fall, new countries are created; and then in the 1860s and 1870s, you see a whole bunch of books being published reflecting these huge conflicts in the modern world. You have Fathers and Sons. You have Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. You have Nietzsche publishing Beyond Good and Evil.

All of these books are grappling with these incredibly powerful forces at the heart of how the modern world is evolved; individual rights, spreading and spreading; markets, spreading and spreading; the idea of constitutions, spreading and spreading; and undermining traditional ideas.

New types emerge in literature and then become real. They play out in the Russian revolutionaries of the late 19th century, and then you can see them actually seize power in 1917. And, if you flip to 1933, you have the sight of Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential thinkers in the 20th century, particularly on the left, actively welcoming in to Germany’s ancient universities, the Nazi regime.

Now in the 20th century, you have two sort of big attempts to grapple with these modern forces in ways different than the Anglo-American system: the socialist experiment, and the fascist experiment. Both of these failed for different reasons. After 1991, this new world emerged. But what’s happened to us now, and why the news feels so crazy, is that we are going through the same remorseless historical process.

If you talk to the people in charge, you hear exactly the same sorts of things as these old guys were writing about in the 1840s; the rise of new ideas in universities; the young seem to be going crazy. In the 1840s, it was railways and telegrams. Now it’s social media, AI, biotech. The international security infrastructure, built from 1945, with Nato, the UN and the EU – all of these institutions also seem to be crumbling in the same way as in the 1840s.

So what? What can we start to build to get ourselves out of the mess that we have got ourselves into? You have to consider the regime as a complex system, and there is no single magic thing that you can do to change it. Asking the old people to change the institutions will fail. Just putting new people in the old institutions will also fail. You have to change the people, the ideas, the institutions and the tools altogether.

It’s a system that’s coming apart in Whitehall and it needs to be replaced by a different system. So the first thing is that, for a very long time, the government has not controlled the government. This is the first thing that needs to change. If you look back 200 odd years to 1795 under William Pitt, you see a regime that took elite talent very seriously but took individual responsibility for projects very seriously. It understood the connections between how government buys things and the science and technology ecosystem necessary for building long-term capabilities. Pitt had real meetings in No. 10 Downing Street, not the fake scripted meetings now, where the conclusions are written by officials before the meeting ever happens. That’s not a parody from Westminster. That is actually the process for how modern government works. The big battle in Whitehall over power is not what people say in meetings, which are largely fake and irrelevant. The battle for power in Whitehall is about who gets to write the conclusions of what the Prime Minister says before the meeting starts. That’s not how Pitt did things, but it’s how it’s how Whitehall works now.

Back then, technologists and entrepreneurs could build great things fast and at scale because of wise procurement, which was taken extremely seriously. parliament threw people in jail during the Napoleonic Wars for procuring cannons. In stark contrast to how, after Covid, those responsible for procurement scandals were all obviously promoted. So the Whitehall in 1795 was more like Space X 2025 than Whitehall 2025 is.

All of these different aspects therefore have to be systematically reversed if you’re going to actually have a serious government and a different political regime.

On day one, a new prime minister that actually wants to take the country in a different direction and solve these problems, has to immediately fire and replace many, many, many of the existing officials who control things. The Prime Minister’s Office needs to take back control of No. 10. It needs to close the Cabinet Office, and it needs to take over the functions that the Cabinet Office has acquired over a century.

Now, remember, the Cabinet Office was set up in 1916, 1917, in the crisis of world war one, as the old Victorian system couldn’t cope. This system has gradually taken more and more power, so that the real people with power inside the system have become Cabinet Office officials.

The Cabinet Secretary now has something like 100 times more power than the average minister does. People often ask me about 2019 and the Brexit negotiations: ‘What did this minister think about this? What about the rows between this minister and that minister?’ And my answer to them is, ‘I don’t really remember. And it wasn’t important’. The ministers were not important in this process. I cared very much what the 30-year old officials in the Cabinet Office thought about these things, because they were the ones with real power.

If all kinds of things happen today, if when bombs go off, for example, or if a Secretary of State is caught by the security services in unsuitable liaisons, it’s not the ministers that get called first. The wiring diagram of power inside the system means that it’s the Cabinet Secretary who is called first when the bombs go off and when crises happen. And the Cabinet Secretary decides which ministers are allowed to see what. All of that must change. We can’t carry on if you want things to be different. You can’t carry on with a system where the political ministers are essentially non-player characters in a video game, and the characters with real power are the unelected officials. You can’t carry on with a system where the ministers all walk up Downing Street and smile for the cameras, and the media and the MPs pretend that the decisions are actually being made in the cabinet.

I can tell you the decisions are not made in the cabinet. In the whole of 2020, I never even bothered attending cabinet once. The reason is because it’s become fake. Fake meetings, whereas the real decisions and the real power have moved elsewhere. So you replace people, you bring in new people, you close down the Cabinet Office, the prime minister takes over the Cabinet Office, the powers of the Cabinet Office.

At the moment, the Prime Minister has literally no role whatsoever in the management of key permanent secretaries who actually run the government departments. Nothing at all to do with it. The entire HR system of Whitehall works for the Cabinet Secretary, not for the Prime Minister. If you want change on what’s important – if you want to see a different regime – you have to have a Prime Minister who is actually in charge of setting the priorities for the key officials in the country. That doesn’t happen now. When we started to do that in 2020, the system went crazy and complained that it was fascism. But this really should not be controversial. In the old days, ministerial responsibility was genuine. It became fake. Switching it back to being genuine is not fascism.

I think the essential concept of permanent civil servants, which was started in the 1850s, is at the root of a lot of the problems. The civil service system has become a closed caste system with Brahmins and untouchables. The Brahmins are insiders promoted through the system, regardless of failure. Look at our current Cabinet Secretary; he was responsible for pandemic preparation and planning. Of course, therefore, the old system has not fired him. It’s promoted him. It’s given him honours. And it’s now put him in charge of the entire civil service.

The Untouchables are the roughly 100 per cent of the world’s most effective people, none of whom could be hired inside Whitehall by ministers. And the insane HR system means that everybody changes jobs every two years, roughly. So if you’re sitting in No. 10, you have a series of meetings with someone in charge of, for example, Chinese cyber operations. And you talk to them and you talk to them. You have meeting after meeting, and then suddenly this person vanishes completely and some new person arrives in No. 10 and you say: ‘Oh, hello, who are you?’. And they say: ‘Oh, I’m so-and-so’. And you say: ‘Oh, right. Okay. Um, so what are you doing?’. ‘Oh, I’ve been in charge of special educational needs for the last two years’. ‘Oh, right. Okay. You’re now in charge of Chinese cyber operations?’. ‘Yeah’.

So the justification for the entire permanent civil service system is supposedly that it develops expertise. But the actual way in which it works now is pathologically hostile to actual expertise. It doesn’t let anyone develop expertise. And it forces people, if you want promotion and you want to get a pay rise, you have to do this constant zigzagging every two years up through the HR system.

All of that needs to be completely swept away. It was created in the 1850s, and, in my opinion, it’s no coincidence that from the time that the so-called professional civil service took over, that marked the beginning of institutional dysfunction spreading throughout the Westminster system, because it became fundamentally impossible for elected ministers to change things by changing the people. And that’s really where I think responsibility and fake meetings started to take over.

So there’s a few other things that you need to do in parallel with this. Once you’ve actually taken power, and the prime minister is now actually in charge of Whitehall, the power of the Treasury has to be shattered into a thousand pieces. The Treasury’s processes for all long-term projects are an absolute disaster. They make it impossible for people to plan. They make everything super expensive. Today, with the publication of this spending review, you see this process. Now, behind the scenes, what happens is everybody lies in the spending review process, and all of the budget numbers everyone knows are completely fake. Everyone at the heart of power inside the Treasury at the No. 10 system knows those numbers are all fake. The long-term budgeting process also means that you have a constant churn whereby entities all over Whitehall can’t actually organise themselves over a five or ten or 15-year period.

They’re constantly told by the Treasury: No, your ceiling for budgets is just here. Even though the project extends for years beyond that. So you see completely crazy things like, the officials in charge of project X, say at the MOD, are told that everyone on project X will be fired in June because the Treasury won’t guarantee that the budget is still going to be there after, say, November. People are fired, things closed down, And then, in November, the Treasury goes – oh, actually, some 30-year-old, who read PPE 100 yards from here (in Oxford) – says: ‘No, no, no, actually this programme can carry on’. And the people are all hired again. All you’ve done is waste millions of quid and waste everyone’s time. This is regarded as a completely standard, sensible way for Whitehall to organise how it spends all of your money.

The Prime Minister’s Office has got to take responsibility for building a completely new process for long-term budgets, and that obviously impacts with the government procurement. As I said before, 200 years ago, this country was the best country in the world at actually doing procurement. Now it is a poster child for some of the most insane decisions that you can possibly imagine. Even the simplest things like building a dual carriageway is now scheduled to take years. That is completely normal. And if you say: ‘This is mad, and what we’re going to do instead is just systematically rip up all of these rules’, much of the system will go completely crazy. Because the system doesn’t see itself as there to deliver for you, the voters, for the taxpayers. The system sees itself as there to protect itself.

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It’s very routine when you’re sitting inside No. 10 and you look at rolling news on TV and you see some story rolling, scrolling across the bottom of the screen saying ‘Disaster on blah, blah, blah’. You look out the window and you see the official responsible for it just pottering through Horse Guards on the way to the Tube. The culture of direct responsibility is now almost completely unknown and is seen in Whitehall as something that’s almost deranged if you try and do it.

So during Covid, when we said: ‘Okay, we’ve got to try and get testing going faster, we’ve got to try and get vaccines going faster. We’ve got to try and get a thousand things going. We’re going to put a named individual in charge of each of these things, so that everybody knows that person is the person to call and that person is responsible, right?’ This is not exactly revolutionary management. This is how every single functioning entity on planet Earth works. And this was seen in Whitehall as revolutionary and hostile and to be resisted.

Now, if you think that that’s the mindset, even when thousands of people are dying every week and it’s a genuine crisis, imagine what it’s like to change things in normal times now; that’s why Keir Starmer is finding that he has meetings. Everyone nods and smiles. And then, three months later, no one did anything because no one really cares what the Prime Minister thinks.

The system just rumbles on with its own priorities. Why has Starmer got himself into the single biggest political disaster of his premiership on winter fuel payments? Was that in his manifesto? No. Did he say he wanted to do it? No. Did Labour MPs want to do it? No. Why? What happened? It happened because it’s on the 30-year-old Treasury official’s priority list. And if you’ve got non-player characters as prime ministers and as ministers, and a system that operates in this mad way, the system will put its priorities in front of the ministers and push them out on TV to announce things. And then the rest of the MPs go, ‘Where the hell is this coming from? Why are we doing this? We don’t understand’.

All of these different things need to change. The other thing that you need to do in No. 10 – so you’ve actually taken power from the Cabinet Office, you’ve closed the Cabinet Office you’ve got rid of the HR system so you can fire people, replace people, hire the world’s best people to come and work on important government buildings – you change the procurement system so the government can now actually buy and sell and do things on normal timescales rather than on 20 or 30-year timescales.

The other central thing that has to happen is science and technology have to become embedded in the Prime Minister’s Office as a core priority of No. 10 Downing Street. We can’t carry on with a government system in which we have a Western civilisation that’s based on science and technology and a political cultural elite dominant in politics and Whitehall that is ignorant of, or contemptuous about, science and technology. That is a recipe for catastrophe.

A new regime that’s actually serious about turning the country around has to do – as well as these kind of bureaucratic and power changes that I’ve described inside the Number 10/ Whitehall complex – is to say that science and technology, both for prosperity and for security, are now going to become critical aspects of how the Prime Minister spends his time in the same way that they are on national security issues and budgets. They have to be at the top of the PM’s inbox and completely integrated into how the Prime Minister’s Office actually works.

If you do all these things, you won’t solve all of our problems for sure, but you will at least have a functioning regime that can build things, rather than a dysfunctional and pathological regime.

The last thing I’ll say then is, if I was going to be on a desert island, one of the top three books that I would take with me is War and Peace. And if you think about War and Peace, there are two kind of strands running through. One strand is that these inexorable human forces, inexorable forces of history, collide and smash. And it doesn’t really matter what individual people do and think. They just get broken and washed along in the flood.

And the other part of the story is that, at some times, what one person thinks and does can have a huge effect on what happens. Both things are true at the same time.

Over the next five years, everyone in this room is going to live through two things. They’re going to live through these old regimes of the Western world continuing to crumble and disintegrate and fail. Both the old parties are like one of those Japanese movies where a samurai whips their heads off, but they haven’t quite realised yet that they’re dead. But they are. Samurai has done his bit, the Tories and Labour are (dead). And the AI and biological engineering strand is going to continue as well. And these two things are going to be very connected. These forces are going to smash into all of our lives. They’re going to affect them in all sorts of ways.

But also, I would just say there’s a last thing that, as per Tolstoy’s message in War and Peace, we can have agency at these moments of crisis. Everyone here can build things. You can prepare for this extremely different world that’s coming. One of the most obvious things to do, I think, is not everything can be about Westminster, not everything should be about Westminster. It’s one of the problems that it’s centralised so much power there. We’ve got to deal with the dysfunction of Westminster. We have to return to a civilisation in this country where other parts of the country can actually build things and do things. And the most obvious thing? It strikes me that there’s something that everyone in this room could get involved with, which is the replacement of the old school system. The AI thing means it’s doomed, a bit like the old parties; the current system (with) fake exams, fake curriculum created by the bureaucratic state to try to justify that it knows what it’s doing, has destroyed in lots of ways the old European (system of) education and the institutions. That old system is doomed. New things are definitely going to come. And the sooner the people like those in this room start building them, what comes next, the better.

We don’t have to wait for Westminster and Whitehall. They won’t like it, but they’re too broken to be able to stop us. So we can start building alternative things for our children to go into. And if you start creating alternative educational ecosystem in time, that will help us replace the rotten old political regime which is crumbling at the same time.

How good was Brian Wilson?

I recently did an online quiz to name the 100 biggest selling pop and rock acts in the USA. The Beatles came top – the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Queen and so on, along with the homegrown stuff: Elvis, the Eagles and Chicago. Noticeable by their complete absence were the Beach Boys. In the late sixties and early seventies they were often considered superior artists to the Beatles by American critics. I don’t think many would have that view now. It is not so much that their stock has fallen, simply that they now seem a rather lovely idiosyncrasy rather than at the very top of the division.

That Brian Wilson was a very good songwriter is beyond all question. He was also an imaginative stylist. Nobody else sounded like the Beach Boys, unless they were deliberately copying the Beach Boys (such as Paul McCartney’s sweet attempt at Cold War rapprochement, Back in the USSR).

The songs, described by Wilson as “teenage symphonies to God”, were drawn from pre-rock origins – George Gershwin rather than Little Richard. The melodies veered from the sublime (God Only Knows, Don’t Worry Baby) through the pleasantly disposable (Help Me Rhonda, Surfin’ USA) to the hugely irritating (Barbara Ann, Sloop John B). And then there was Good Vibrations, Wilson’s stab at psychedelia.

In truth, it was hard to listen to even their best albums (Pet Sounds, Smiley Smile) all the way through without feeling, at the end, a little bit icky, as if you had been immersed in corn syrup for half an hour. But there was a beauty there, in the harmonies and in the construction of some of those songs; a delicacy largely absent from the charts at that febrile time. And at a time when the USA was being taken over by British acts, they could hardly have been more all-American.

Brian died yesterday and we are right to mourn his passing. He was, famously, plagued by mental illness. But it is also likely that his slightly unhinged mentality was partly responsible for some very pretty pop music. Where does he rank? Not quite in the same league as Bacharach, Webb, McCartney, Lennon perhaps. But that is hardly a disgrace.

Trump’s birthday surprise – war with Iran?

The Trump presidency is giving us all a type of news-related diabetes. So much sensational information is spewing out of our screens all the time. There are so many stories, so much richness and history and irony, and so much silliness and seriousness entwined. We are dangerously overfed and now the lines of reality are blurring and people feel mad and sick.

The Trump-Musk saga goes on, as Elon telephones Donald and shows his contrition on X. Trump sends in troops to control anti-ICE protests. Trump attends Les Miserables at his increasingly camp Kennedy Center. And then, of course, there’s the US army’s 250th birthday celebrations on Saturday – which also happens to be Trump’s 79th birthday – while the streets of Washington, DC are being reinforced to cope with all the military machinery. And that’s just this week.

Will the great display make Americans feel safe? We shall see. It’s also possible that the martial jamboree will coincide with a new war in the Middle East as – surprise! – Israeli jets attack Iran.

US-Iran negotiations appear to have broken down in recent days. Yesterday, the news broke that the State Department has initiated the evacuation of some of its personnel from Iraq, in anticipation of retaliatory actions from Iran. The Pentagon is also authorizing military families to exit the region. “Based on our latest analysis, we decided to reduce the footprint of our mission in Iraq,” says Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Trump, wearing his tuxedo for the big, beautiful show at the Kennedy Center last night, told reporters that Iran “could be a dangerous place… We’ve given notice to move out; we’ll see what happens.” Team Trump and its envoy, Steve Witkoff, are still in dialogue with Iranian officials, but for now there seems to be no room for an agreement on Iran’s nuclear enrichment. The Iranian military has reportedly been running through its counter-strike options following an Israeli attack. That could include thousands of missile strikes on Israeli/US targets across the region. “We are ready,” declared the official Islamic Republic of Iran’s X account yesterday, ominously.

Other regional powers, such as Qatar, say that the Israeli attacks on Iran could cause drought and chaos throughout the region. Washington hawks have become increasingly confident that Iran is a “paper tiger,” which will fold under serious pressure. But most analysts agree that any move by Israel to take out Iran’s nuclear program could have dramatic and extremely grave escalatory consequences. So happy birthday, Mr. President and the US army. How about another Middle East war?

The above is taken from Freddy Gray’s weekly Americano newsletter. To subscribe click here.

The un-American revolution 

The riots raging in Los Angeles are an unwelcome present ahead of America’s birthday, which is less than a month away. But they’re also a timely reminder of just what that birthday, the Fourth of July, is about. After all, American independence was conceived in rioting and brazen defiance of law enforcement. 

Some 250 years ago, Boston was aflame with the spirit of resistance. Then, too, as in LA today, soldiers had to be called out to quell the mobs. In 1770, that led to an incident known to history as the Boston massacre. Violently harassed by hundreds of protesters, seven British soldiers fired into the crowd, killing three people on the spot and wounding several more, two of whom later died.  

Those casualty figures might be what’s called “the weekend” in some of our cities today. But what matters where political violence is concerned is how the bloodshed combines with cries of principle. If the Marines that President Trump has sent to Los Angeles kill five protesters, those who sympathize with the mob will say this proves everything they’ve long been warning about. They claimed Trump was a fascist – and here’s the proof. The mere sight of police in riot gear and soldiers moving into the city already confirms many liberals’ worst fears.  

The issue at the heart of the unrest then and now might seem to be very different – but in fact it’s the same. The American colonists would not submit to foreign rule, and the British, they came to feel, were not fellow countrymen from across an ocean but an alien power. The Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, put that feeling into legal terms, the law in question being not the law of England but “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” The Americans were one people and the British were another, and because British laws and leaders were bad for the American people, in their own estimation (and, they argued, surely in the eyes of the world, too), the people of the United States were prepared to sever their connections with the king they shared with England and his minister and establish their own new government. 

This year’s LA riots are also about drawing the line between foreign and native. But this time it’s the rioters who are flying the flag of an alien government, namely Mexico’s. What looks foreign to one side registers as native to the other, however. The illegal immigrants resisting arrest feel entitled to be where they are, and the protesters supporting them do not concede the legitimacy of the United States government to enforce its laws. They just don’t have a Thomas Jefferson, or anyone as brave and honest as he was, to make explicit what their defiance really means.  

Rioting is an American tradition that Republicans as well as Democrats occasionally indulge – though it has to be said that Democrats indulge it much more often and to a greater extent, as a comparison of the January 6, 2021 hooliganism at the nation’s Capitol to the arson and shootings that accompanied the George Floyd protests a few months earlier will attest. And progressives more often than not consider “protest,” even when it descends into street violence, an inherently noble thing. But be that as it may, the crux of contention between left and right is not about rioting but about allegiance. American patriots once used mob tactics and scofflawery to clear the way for the form of government expressed by the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. And the greatest debate the new nation had to have with itself after it had won its independence was whether the protest politics that had sparked the Revolution would continue – sustaining a continual revolution, or igniting one after another – or whether a more stable kind of politics, with greater respect for government, would be established with the Constitution. Overthrowing the British was one thing; overthrowing the republic that the patriots themselves had fought to create was another. This was their own country, after all. 

Even at the time, there were some radical Americans who did think the upheavals should continue – Jefferson himself thought the Constitution should be rewritten every generation. The progressive liberals who support today’s riots in LA are no Jeffersonians, however, because they don’t even think of this country as theirs. Their country is larger and less local, bypassing existing borders and encompassing a public that may wave many different flags, including Mexico’s. This public consists of all who are considered oppressed or disadvantaged, regardless of their citizenship or legal status. And representing this public is not a formal government elected by the people – there can’t be such a thing when there is no concrete, place-specific citizen population – but a class of leaders who are entitled to speak for the oppressed by virtue of their superior understanding of human rights.  

The battle on the streets of LA is between these two different ideas of government. Laws that do not conform to progressive ideas of human rights, including (and especially) immigration laws, are as invalid as taxation without representation was for the American patriots. But the progressives are anti-patriots, whose whole idea of government rejects the kind of patriotism and government that the American Revolution was fought for – not in the name of going back to British paternalism but in the name of going forward to a universal liberal order. The philosophical descendants of the riotous revolutionaries, meanwhile, are now conservative populists who have to defend what was set up more than 200 years ago. The American Revolution drew a line separating America from British power. The revolution the LA riots are advancing today is about erasing the line separating America from Mexico and from everyone else. The old American revolutionaries fought for a government of their own. The new post-American revolutionaries are fighting for a government that is not beholden only to its citizens but that instead belongs to everybody – and therefore to nobody. It’s the citizen, or rather the subject, who belongs to the government, or rather the ruling class, in this new order. The Los Angeles riots are not likely to turn into anything that looks like the revolution of 250 years ago. But the implications of what’s happening now are just as profound. 

So happy birthday, America – and let’s hope your 250th won’t be your last. 

Reform gains another councillor in blow for Scottish Tories

Dear oh dear. With just days to go until the Scottish Conservative conference, party leader Russell Findlay will have been hoping for a quiet news week. He has had no such luck however – at the eleventh hour, it transpires that yet another one of his Aberdeenshire councillors has defected to Reform UK. Lauren Knight has become the party’s fifth representative on the council – and party officials insist that with the support of two independent councillors, they now have an official group. The tide is turning…

Knight, who represents the ward of Huntly, Strathbogie and Howe of Alford, was previously a Tory party member. But her move to Reform comes as she feels her party ‘has left her’, with the Aberdeenshire councillor adding she ‘feels let down by so many broken promises’. She went on: ‘Scotland has been abandoned by the two party establishment, which continues to prioritise self interests and party politics over genuine change.’ Ouch.

And by choosing the timing she has done to jump ship, Knight has rubbed salt in Scottish Tory wounds ahead of the party’s annual conference this weekend. She is the 10th councillor the party has lost to Reform since the end of last year, and her move comes as the party prepares to contest Scotland’s mainstream political parties in next year’s 2026 Holyrood election. Findlay has attacked the councillors who have turned their backs on him, blasting their decisions in the Press & Journal as ‘opportunistic’. Reform UK’s Thomas Kerr – formerly the Conservative group leader on Glasgow City Council – has hit back, remarking: ‘Reform UK is delighted to be living rent-free in Russell Findlay’s head.’ The gloves are coming off…

Today’s development comes a week after the Hamilton by-election where, despite coming third, Reform UK took 26 per cent of the constituency vote – outperforming their place in the polls and coming just 500 votes behind the party of government, the SNP. Kerr insists the party is the ‘fastest growing’ in Scotland, telling the Spectator last month that the party has 10,500 members and claims to be close to overtaking Scottish Labour’s numbers. Indeed the party even managed to recruit its first Labour defector last week, with Renfrewshire council’s Jamie McGuire swapping in his red tie for teal. Will more defections come ahead of the finalisation of Reform UK’s Holyrood selection list? Stay tuned…

The tragedy of Brian Wilson’s life

The late Brian Wilson, who has died aged 82, once had his songs, which included modern-day classics such as ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Good Vibrations’, described as ‘pocket symphonies to God’. For just about any other artist, such a description would be grandiloquent tosh. Yet in the case of Wilson, who struggled with personal demons that all but consumed him after a brief, brilliant flourish of early success, such praise is entirely justified. It is little wonder that his friend and rival Paul McCartney was inspired to write Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band after hearing the Beach Boys’ masterpiece Pet Sounds for the first time. That album was thrillingly alive to the possibilities of what pop music could be and transformed American culture forever.

It is the central tragedy of Wilson’s life, however, that he was both blessed and cursed with genius that eventually overwhelmed him. He became part of the Beach Boys in 1961, who were originally intended to be a light-hearted surf rock band, managed by Wilson’s father, Murry. Wilson arrived at his zenith of artistic achievement with Pet Sounds in 1966, but its success and acclaim overwhelmed him. Its follow-up, Smile, from which ‘Good Vibrations’ emerged, was never released, and he sank into a quagmire of alcohol and drug abuse from which he never managed to truly recover. He continued to record and release music, but during the Seventies, especially, it is doubtful that he had any clear idea what was going on most of the time.

He was rescued, if that’s the right word to use, by the psychologist Eugene Landy, who kind of took coercive control of Wilson in the late Eighties. Landy turned Wilson into the iteration of himself that would last, with minor variations, until the end of his life. By the early 2000s, Wilson, who had spent most of the previous decade mired in litigation with his former bandmates, was persuaded to perform his best-known albums live once again. Although acclaimed to the skies by eager fans at the time, I remember seeing him perform Smile in London in 2004 and feeling a sense of unease that this clearly deeply unwell and confused man had been persuaded – or coerced – into taking to the stage once again.

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He was a shambling, barking figure, with his once-beautiful voice ravaged by age and lifestyle; only his superb band managed to keep matters together. Alexis Petridis nailed it in a negative review of one of his many comeback albums when he wrote in the Guardian that:

Wilson’s face now seems to arrange itself naturally into an expression of horrified bewilderment – suggesting he isn’t entirely sure what is going on, but is pretty certain he doesn’t like it.

The word ‘mad’ is often bandied around lightly, but Wilson’s mental health meant that the veteran performer was a sad, near-pathetic shadow of the genius boy who he was in the Sixties. Yet his achievements during that brief, brilliant summer of his career have seldom been matched by anyone.

The Beach Boys’ harmonies, with the complexity of their arrangements and orchestration and, most of all, the thrill they bring as some of the most indelibly brilliant songs ever written are glorious to listen to. It suggests that, if Wilson made a Faustian pact to have this brief period of glory followed by decades of trouble and sorrow, then he at least made the most out of his halcyon period.

If there is a greater, more affecting love song than ‘God Only Knows’ – complete with the attention-grabbing opening ‘I may not always love you, but as long as there are stars above you, you never need to doubt it’ – then I would like to hear it. A long period of personal trouble now comes to an end with Wilson’s death. The greatest tribute to him is to listen to his peerless songs once again and rhapsodise in the work of an authentic genius.

Is Israel preparing to strike Iran?

While much of the Western debate remains trapped in tired slogans and false moral narratives, events on the ground in the Middle East have taken a decisive turn. In the past 24 hours, U.S. embassies have begun evacuating non-essential staff. Military dependents are being authorised to leave key bases. Multiple reports say U.S. officials have been told Israel is fully ready to launch an operation against Iran if required, and Washington expects possible Iranian retaliation on American sites in Iraq.

The trigger is Iran’s growing stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium, its preparations for potential retaliation against any Israeli strike, and the breakdown of progress in nuclear talks. Meanwhile, in Gaza, as Western commentators obsess over supposed Israeli crimes, Hamas deliberately attacked a convoy of humanitarian aid workers, killing and injuring those delivering life-saving relief, according to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The region is moving to dangerous thresholds while too many in the West cling to delusional narratives and moral theatre that can no longer disguise the facts.

U.S. embassies across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and North Africa have been ordered to convene emergency action committees and report their risk mitigation measures to Washington. This directive, as reported by the Washington Post, led to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s decision on Wednesday to authorise the departure of nonessential personnel in Iraq.

“We are constantly assessing the appropriate personnel posture at all our embassies,” a State Department official said. “Based on our latest analysis, we decided to reduce the footprint of our mission in Iraq.” A senior diplomat in the region put the mood in stark terms: “We are watching and worried. We think it’s more serious than any other time in the past.”

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Military preparations are also accelerating. Naval Support Activity Bahrain, home to U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, has been placed on high alert. In Iraq’s Al-Anbar province, increased military air activity has been observed. The U.S. anticipates that Iranian retaliation against U.S. assets in Iraq could follow any Israeli strike. This concern contributed to Washington’s decision to advise some Americans to leave the region earlier on Wednesday.

Iran’s posture is evolving in parallel. The New York Times reports that Iranian military and government officials have already met to discuss their response to a potential Israeli strike. A senior Iranian official told the paper that Tehran has prepared a response plan involving an immediate counterstrike on Israel with hundreds of ballistic missiles.

The catalyst behind these developments remains Iran’s advancing nuclear programme. According to a recent confidential IAEA report cited by Reuters, Iran has amassed about 408.6 kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent, a quantity sufficient for nearly one nuclear weapon if further refined. Britain, France and Germany, known as the E3, have signalled they are ready to trigger UN ‘snapback’ provisions to reapply sanctions on Iran if its nuclear programme continues unchecked, with some Western diplomats suggesting such action could come as early as August.

Diplomatic efforts continue, but seem increasingly futile. A sixth round of direct talks between U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is scheduled for the coming days. Two U.S. officials confirmed to CBS News that Witkoff still plans to attend. Yet Witkoff’s public remarks last night underscore the gravity of the challenge. Speaking at a United Hatzalah event, he said:

“A nuclear Iran represents an existential threat to Israel as does an Iran with a large amount of missiles. That is as big an existential threat as the nuclear threat. And this is an existential threat to the United States and the free world and the entire GCC. We must stand resolute and united against this danger and ensure that Iran never attains the means to achieve its deadly ambitions no matter what the cost.”

Markets have responded sharply. Oil prices rose more than 4 per cent on Wednesday, reaching their highest level in two months, amid fears that Persian Gulf shipping lanes could be affected by military escalation.

Alongside these developments, a separate gruesome attack demands clear moral response. On Wednesday night at approximately 10 p.m. local time, a bus carrying over two dozen members of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation team (local Palestinian aid workers working alongside the U.S. GHF team) was attacked by Hamas terrorists as it travelled to a distribution centre west of Khan Younis. The GHF’s statement leaves no doubt: “At least five fatalities, multiple injuries, and fear that some of our team members may have been taken hostage. We condemn this heinous and deliberate attack in the strongest possible terms.”

The GHF reports that Hamas had openly threatened its team and the civilians they serve in recent days, while Western news outlets ran cover for them by constantly suggesting Israel was shooting at civilians seeking aid. The attack represents a direct assault on humanitarian principles and the integrity of civil society.

“These were aid workers,” the GHF statement continues, “Humanitarians. Fathers, brothers, sons, and friends, who were risking their lives every day to help others.” When Israel mistakenly killed World Central Kitchen aid workers after terrorists knowingly endangered them, the world reacted with outrage. Now we will see whether politicians and the media speak out on this deliberate targeting of aid workers by Hamas.

Until now, Hamas’s threats against the humanitarian efforts were met with silence from those who should have condemned them. The UK was busy sanctioning Israeli cabinet ministers. That silence must end, with the international community unequivocally denouncing Hamas for this atrocity.

Despite these developments in the Gaza Strip and across the entire region, the complex humanitarian effort to feed Gaza’s citizens continues, as do the diplomatic efforts to address Iran’s nuclear programme – even as military preparations advance on multiple fronts, and the possibility of kidnapped American humanitarian workers is being investigated.

There is a hard reality that many in the West have chosen not to confront. From Paris, London, and Ottawa to the BBC and other Western media outlets, public debate has too often been trapped in abstract talking points: the fantasy of a viable Palestinian state led by terrorist factions, the ritualised condemnation of Israel, and the refusal to acknowledge the scale of Iranian and Hamas aggression. But events on the ground are indifferent to such illusions.

Iran’s nuclear and missile posture is advancing. Hamas is murdering aid workers. The region is moving toward dangerous thresholds while too many in the West cling to a moral fable of putative Israeli bloodlust and deliberate starvation – a narrative that no longer fits the facts. The question now is whether Western leaders are prepared to face this reality with the clarity and resolve it demands, or whether they will persist in narratives that leave them powerless as others reshape the strategic landscape of the Middle East.

Britain’s GDP decline is bad news for Rachel Reeves’s spending plans

Rachel Reeves delivered her spending plans for the next three years less than 24 hours ago, but already the credibility of the Chancellor’s plans are in doubt. GDP fell by 0.3 per cent in April, according to figures released this morning by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It spells the end of a run of more positive economic readings that Reeves had hoped would buy her room to manoeuvre in the run up to the autumn budget – when she will have to explain to the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the nation, how her spending review sums add up.

The economy contracted across both services and manufacturing with legal firms and estate agents ‘fairing badly’ because of a sharp increase in house sales in March as home buyers and sellers raced to complete their transactions before the stamp duty thresholds increased. The car industry had a particularly bad month too, while the construction industry faired slightly better; it grew by 0.9 per cent.

There was much some better news: real GDP grew by 0.7 per cent in the three months to April. But ONS statisticians cautioned that much of this was because economic activity that would have occurred in April was brought forward to earlier in the year. This was likely to be where businesses made purchases and placed orders in February and March as they scrambled to stock up in fear of the tariff turmoil that was about to be unleashed by US President Donald Trump.

Another reason why the economy faltered in April is no doubt a result of the contraction we saw in the jobs market thanks to what businesses see as anti-hiring policies. The increase in the national minimum wage, as well as the £25 billion raid on employer national insurance led to 109,000 job losses in a single month and 274,000 fewer payrolled employees in a year.

The Chancellor looked relaxed last night as she donned her casual clothes to go for the customary post-fiscal event drink at the Treasury's local pub in Westminster, the Two Chairmen. But she’s woken up to the first flashing warning light on the dashboard that all may not be well come autumn. If the economy continues to perform sluggishly it’s easy to see how downgrades to GDP forecasts and stubbornly high borrowing costs could threaten the already slim headroom she left herself in the spring. When that happens, she’ll be looking slightly less cheery having just been forced to raise taxes and quite possibly undo some of the spending plans she approved yesterday.

Why isn’t the BBC telling us what caused the Ballymena riots?

Does anyone know what’s actually happening in Ballymena, in Northern Ireland? If you’ve just been following the news on the BBC, it’s actually quite hard to work out what has led to the violence which has injured at least 32 police officers.

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The initial news bulletins told us that there rioting youths were protesting about a sexual attack on a girl and that two teenage boys were in custody facing charges. My first thought – reverting to the Troubles – was that there was a sectarian element to the whole thing. But we also learned that the police condemned the riots as racist thuggery; so, not sectarianism, it seems, but something to do with race.

A few further details came to light yesterday. We found out that the rioters were still rioting. A local MP popped up on the news to say that people were unsettled by the number of immigrants in the area. And the BBC informed us that the 14-year-old youths – who deny sexual assault –  confirmed their names and ages through a Romanian interpreter at Coleraine Magistrates’ Court. But these glimmers of information still offered little clarity. Wouldn’t it be easier and simpler if the BBC just said that two Romanian boys living in the area are accused of an offence? Instead, we’re left to make informed guesses ourselves about what’s actually going on.

The coverage of events in Ballymena brings to mind that of the Southport murders last July. There were allegations that the murderer was an asylum seeker; these allegations were promptly dismissed as ‘fake news’ or misinformation. The BBC’s reporters told us that the attacker was born in Britain and living in Southport. We know now, of course, that he is Axel Rudakubana, whose Rwandan parents came here after the genocide. That fact – that his parents were from Rwanda – wasn’t irrelevant to the case; their son was, it seems, obsessed with the genocide and indeed with extreme violence of all sorts. Trying to pretend that he was just some random local wasn’t helpful; people inevitably came to their own conclusions.

The Dublin riots in 2023 happened after an Algerian was charged with stabbing a school assistant and three children, seriously injuring a five-year-old girl. But the authorities – and the news – carefully glossed over the bad-taste question of the background of the alleged attacker; social media inevitably filled the vacuum, which is precisely why the riots had an anti-immigrant aspect. Riad Bouchaker is yet to stand trial and denies the charges.

Won’t state broadcasters ever learn that not telling us things isn’t helpful? People work things out for themselves. And if they’re not told clearly by the BBC, or whoever, what the background is of the alleged perpetrators in these cases, well, the public is going to arrive at its own conclusions. This was what I did, and presumably what the Ballymena rioters have done, only amplified by social media.

The sense that elements of a story are being kept from us for our own good – that is, lest people get angry about it – only adds to the idea that we’re not really grown up enough to be trusted with the truth. It’s not a great way to calm things down, you know.

Could Donald Trump scrap Aukus?

America’s policy undersecretary of defence, Elbridge Colby, is one of the brightest brains in Donald Trump’s administration. Having served in the first Trump presidency, Colby has an outstanding reputation as a defence and strategic thinker. He is also, however, very much aligned with Trump’s America First thinking in respect of foreign policy, and the United States’ relationship with her allies.

In tasking Colby on Wednesday with reviewing the Aukus nuclear submarine-centred strategic partnership between the US, the UK and Australia, the president sends a clear message to Britain and Australia: Aukus is part of his inheritance from Joe Biden, and its future therefore is far from assured. In a media statement, the Pentagon said:

‘The department is reviewing Aukus as part of ensuring that this initiative of the previous administration is aligned with the president’s America First agenda. As (Defense) Secretary (Pete) Hegseth has made clear, this means ensuring the highest readiness of our service members, that allies step up fully to do their part for collective defence, and that the defence industrial base is meeting our needs. This review will ensure the initiative meets these common sense, America First criteria.’

Colby himself has been ambivalent about Aukus ever since it was established by Biden, and then Australian and British prime ministers, Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson, in 2021. Addressing a Policy Exchange forum last year, Colby said he was ‘quite sceptical’ about the Aukus pact, and questioned its viability and ultimate benefits. In a more recent interview with the Australian newspaper, Colby said Aukus’s Pillar 1 – the nuclear submarine programme under which Australia would purchase several Virginia-class boats, pending the acquisition of new generation UK-Australian Acute-class submarines – is ‘very problematic’. He did say, however, that Pillar 2 – the sharing of military intelligence and technical know-how between the partners – ‘is great, no problem’.

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Colby’s long-standing concern is the US’s ability to take on China if it ever comes to conflict in the Asia-Pacific, especially over Taiwan.

‘How are we supposed to give away nuclear attack submarines in the years of the window of potential conflict with China?’ he told the Australian. ‘A nuclear attack submarine is the most important asset for a western Pacific fight, for Taiwan, conventionally. But we don’t have enough, and we’re not going to have enough.’

If this is the starting position for Colby’s review, its scepticism contradicts the steadfast commitment to Aukus from the current Australian and British Labour governments. Indeed, Britain’s latest Strategic Defence Review places high priority on the Aukus partnership as an integral element of British strategic and force planning.

Given Colby’s previous form on Aukus, the review may well recommend scaling back or discontinuing the nuclear submarine Aukus pillar. But that would be a strategic disaster for Australia and Britain, let alone for Colby’s own strategic vision, outlined in his 2021 book, of an ‘anti-hegemonic coalition to contain the military ambitions of China’, in which he specifically envisioned Australia. Arguably, it doesn’t matter which country mans the attack nuclear submarines assigned to the Asia-Pacific theatre, as long as the boats are there. But will Colby see it that way?

In Australia, however, the administration’s announcement immediately set a cat amongst the pigeons. Currently, Australia spends just over two per cent of GDP on defence, and the Trump administration, including Colby, is pressuring on Australia to do far more. This month, Hegseth, told his Australian counterpart that Australia should be committing at least 3.5 per cent of GDP to ensure not just Aukus, but that her fighting personnel and ageing military hardware are fit for purpose and contributing commensurately to the Western alliance.

After his face-to-face meeting with Hegseth, Australian defence minister Richard Marles seemed open to the suggestion. His prime minister, Anthony Albanese, is not.

In his first major media appearance since his thumping election win a month ago, Albanese was asked whether the US could renege on supplying nuclear submarines to Australia if spending is deemed inadequate. ‘Well, I think Australia should decide on what we spend on Australia’s defence. Simple as that’, Albanese replied.

It hasn’t escaped notice here that the Pentagon announced its Aukus review less than 48 hours after Albanese made his declaration, and just days before the Australian prime minister is expected to have his first personal meeting with Trump at the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Canada. That meeting, carrying the risk of a public Trump rebuke, surely will be dreaded by Albanese.

Dealing with the Americans’ insistence on a near-doubling of Australia’s defence investment is politically diabolical for Albanese. He has just won re-election on a manifesto promising huge additional social investments, especially in Australia’s version of the NHS and a fiscally ravenous National Disability Insurance Scheme. Albanese must keep his left-wing support base onside by expanding already huge public investments and subsidies in pursuing his government’s ideological Net Zero and 100 per cent renewable energy goals. All that on top of a burgeoning national debt.

To achieve Nato’s GDP defence spending target of 3 per cent, let alone Hegseth’s 3.5, something has to give. Albanese cannot deliver both massive social spending and vast defence outlays: to keep the Americans happy, and justify the continuation of both Aukus pillars, he will need to either prove himself a Bismarck-calibre statesman, or risk electoral wrath if he retreats on his domestic spending promises, and cuts existing programmes across his government, to afford adequate defence spending headroom.

Australia needs America to be a strong ally in our troubled region, but the United States needs steadfast allies like Australia and Britain. Now the administration’s scepticism about Aukus’s value to the US is officially on the table, with a review entrusted to its biggest Aukus sceptic in Elbridge Colby, Australia and Britain must justify why all aspects of the partnership are a worthwhile investment with them, as America’s partners, committed to playing their part in full. How well they do it will be a measure of their political and diplomatic competence.

Nigel Farage was the spending review’s real winner

When chancellors approach a major moment like a Spending Review, they tend to have a figure in their mind’s eye – someone who embodies the type of voter they hope to win over at the next election: a Mondeo man or Stevenage woman. Rachel Reeves clearly had a very specific figure in mind for today’s Spending Review. But unlike her predecessors, this was no Labour voter. Her Spending Review was laser-focused on Nigel Farage.

Between a laundry list of spending pledges that would have you believe Britain is in a boom, Reeves took aim at Farage. She castigated him for backing Liz Truss’s mini-budget and for spending too much time at the pub (arguably one of his best attributes). However, in choosing such tangential attacks, Reeves only drew attention to Labour’s fear of Farage.

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Labour’s spending commitments confirmed they view 2029 as a two-way fight with Reform. Record funding was announced for Scotland and Wales, ahead of local elections next year in which Reform are expected to wipe the floor. Days after Farage put steel-making front and centre of his campaign for Wales – at Port Talbot, no less – Reeves made sure to underline Labour’s commitment to the steel industry, reconfirming half a billion for Tata Steel.

This was paired with a cash injection for up to 350 of the most deprived communities: ‘Funding to improve parks, youth facilities, swimming pools and libraries’, with a focus on jobs, community assets and regeneration. In the absence of a plan to deliver real wage growth and long sought-after ‘renewal’, Reeves is hoping that, come the next election, quick and dirty projects can be plastered onto the leaflets of Labour MPs, in time for them to claim they have actually delivered change.

You don’t need to look far back to see whether or not this will work. It was not that long ago that the Conservatives also gave eye-watering sums to the NHS and tried to cling on to the Red Wall with an almost identical ‘levelling up’ plan, based on pots of funding for local regeneration projects. They too had Green Book reviews and bus fare caps, as recycled by Reeves today.

So why double down on a strategy that was hardly popular with the electorate? With Starmer’s ‘missions’ – of which only one even got a mention from Reeves today – so closely echoing the last government’s ‘five priorities’, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Labour strategists are suffering from collective amnesia.

Labour’s failure to learn from recent political history speaks to their arrogance, rooted in a deeply held belief that Britain’s problems are the result of ‘14 years of Conservative government’. It’s why they came into No. 10 with no plan or narrative for what they wanted to achieve in government. And it’s why they are pursuing the same strategy, choosing the same policies, to be implemented by the same group of civil servants – yet expecting a different result. The winner? Nigel Farage.

The depressing rise of ‘direct cremations’

Twenty per cent of last year’s funerals in Britain were direct cremations – up from 14 per cent in 2020. Numbers are continuing to rise, fast, for this most affordable, clinical form of body disposal: cremations with no ceremony and no attendees. Daytime advertising campaigns put out by corporate firms such as Pure Cremation promote the peace of mind of sprightly 75-year-olds at their laptops, or in their conservatories with mugs of tea, who have just pre-paid for the direct cremation package. In the adverts they gush about the future family knees-up, with cupcakes and balloons, that their relatives will splash out on with the money saved by not paying for an attended funeral.

The helpful man on the phone at Pure Cremation, when I called the 0800 number to request a brochure, said he predicted that at this rate, within 20 years 50 per cent of the population will be choosing this option. Its direct cremation package costs £1,995, which he says is £2,300 cheaper than the average attended cremation or funeral.

It seems a lonely end for one’s mother or father, or indeed oneself – and actually quite expensive for what happens, which is basically waste disposal. Once the death certificate has been issued, your body is taken away in a van from wherever you died and driven to Pure Cremation’s crematorium in Andover, where family visiting and viewing are not permitted in the basic package (which 99 per cent of customers go for).

Dressed in whatever you happened to be wearing at the time of death, you’ll be put into a cheap coffin and refrigerated. On the company’s scheduled date, but with no specified timing, so your family won’t know when it’s happening, you’ll be taken straight to the incinerator. No words of farewell will be spoken. Your ashes will be delivered back to the family by courier within 14 days. Last year, Pure arranged 14,382 direct cremations: that’s 39 per day – and it is just one of many logistics firms offering this service.

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Like many recent conventions, the direct cremation (nicknamed ‘burn and return’) was normalised during the pandemic lockdowns, when grievers found that they quite liked being limited to 12 attendees, or sometimes just five, so they were spared having to meet boring uninvited cousins and former colleagues of their deceased loved ones, and let off having to pay for their fizz and egg sandwiches. It was a short hop from 12 or five attendees to none at all and no ceremony. The dead person is dead so they won’t notice; they weren’t very religious anyway, and they never liked ‘fuss’ or ‘faff’. Direct cremations spare relatives from having anything to do with the physical reality of death: no need to decide on coffin linings or handles, or what to dress the deceased in. You outsource and blind yourself to the entire process and get a nice little urn returned to you, as with a pet dog.

But are we losing a vital aspect of the grieving process if we ditch the attended funeral ceremony and no longer accompany our beloveds to the very end – to the catafalque, the curtains or the grave: a human tradition that dates back at least 100,000 years? A recent survey of 261 mourners found ‘no difference in the “grief experience” between those organising a traditional funeral and those that choose not to’. High-street funeral directors, who are feeling threatened by the direct-cremation craze robbing them of their business, beg to differ.

‘We’ve had people coming in,’ says Mark Ingram, director at the family-run funeral directors Hunnaball in Essex, ‘who say, “We had a direct cremation, and now we really wish we hadn’t.”’ Too late, they’ve noticed they lost something precious by not being there to say a final ceremonial goodbye. If you look on Gransnet, you’ll see alarm spreading among the elderly, bombarded and creeped out by the onslaught of direct-cremation television ads. ‘I hope that when I die, I am not sent off without a family member present, as if I hadn’t existed: the saddest end,’ says one. Another: ‘I find it really bloody depressing to be asked to pay in advance for being roasted in an oven.’

You can see how – as with assisted dying – the elderly could be pressurised into going for this option by the death-averse, non-religious and hard-up young. ‘We’d far rather you left us the money than spending it on your own expensive funeral…’ When a cheap option is available, it’s always tempting to take it. ‘Funeral directors have had it too good for too long, in my opinion,’ said the man at Pure, showing his sales technique.

Hunnaball, which prides itself on the individual attention and respect it gives to every corpse it takes into its care, as well as to the grieving relatives whom it invites to visit and view the body in its chapel of rest, has had to start offering its own cheaper direct-cremation option in order to see off some of the ruthless undercutting by direct-cremation firms. ‘We market ours as local,’ says Ingram. ‘The body will go straight to the local crematorium, and will still be under the local funeral director.’ Which is a step up (humanity-wise) from the hundreds of miles that a corporate firm might cart a body to a centralised crematorium.

‘Everybody in the industry has tried to fight against them,’ Ingram says of the direct-cremation firms and their slick marketing, but it appears to be a losing battle. Will direct cremations spell the end for the old family-run high-street funeral directors, with their hearses and pin-striped pall-bearers, such as Leverton’s in north London which has been going since 1789, and CPJ Field, which has been independently owned for ten generations and making coffins since 1690?

Those in favour of direct cremations speak disparagingly of ‘cookie-cutter’ ceremonies in churches and crematoriums where you’re ‘marshalled’ into a room. ‘No one likes funerals,’ says one of the women in one of Pure’s advertisements. ‘So much money and fuss.’

Actually, some of us do ‘like funerals’, complete with the focal point of the coffin, and see it as a cathartic rite of passage. Just giving a party in memory of someone is no substitute. One vicar tells me that families frequently say to him, after he’s conducted an attended funeral: ‘I’m completely exhausted – but very glad we went through that.’